The plan for 2017

I'm not one for writing obligatory New Year's posts, but I told myself this morning that I would tack something here for posterity, so here it is.

I'm going to spend the year being a "writer" writer. By which I mean I'm going to work on my novel and take on very little commercial freelance work. To that end, I'm very lucky that I've been accepted as writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) for six months (commencing tomorrow!), as well as at a couple other foreign residencies in the latter half of the year.

Objectives for the year: finish a decent draft of the Dakota Project, which I didn't have the time or headspace to properly get into for much of last year, and be very, very prudent about money. Step one of the latter is probably not to go crazy buying all the Chinese New Year goodies that are already flooding the shops.

Actually, my first order of business is to put together the syllabus for the undergraduate creative writing class I'll be teaching as part of the NTU residency. I've taught writing workshops over the past few years, but this'll be my first time back in a formal classroom in over a decade. I'm both excited and prepared to be astonished.

As I alluded to on Twitter earlier today, I'm really lucky to be paid for six months to read books about writing, teach writing and also write. So I'm pretty tingly about 2017, despite the spectre of Trump.

Oh, and if you haven't read it already, check out Kirsten Han's piece, "Lessons From Singapore On Trump’s Authoritarian America".